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Starting to draw

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Revision as of 03:43, 25 May 2015 by Sam Wilson (Talk | contribs)

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This page presents a simple sequence of creating a basic drawing, from a blank document to a printed design. It assumes that you have installed LibreCAD and have opened it to a new default blank drawing. It introduces quite a few LibreCAD concepts, and links to other pages that explain these.

Sketching

The first part of any design is a freehand sketch on paper. This is quick and simple and so allows for greatest freedom in the design process.

TODO: scan of freehand sketch with dimensions.

Construction lines

The first lines of any technical drawing are the construction lines, setting out the locations of all lines without specifying any line types, colours, etc. All straight construction lines are of 'infinite' length — i.e. they extend off the screen in both directions.

  1. Create a new Help Layer with a name such as 'construction', and a colour of magenta or cyan or similar.
  2. Make sure Snap on grid is enabled.
  3. Go to the lines toolbar, select horizontal lines, and draw a line through 0,0 by clicking anywhere on the y-axis 0. This is the lower edge of the drawing.
  4. Switch to vertical lines and add a second line, perpendicular to the first, on the x-axis 0. This is the left-most edge of the drawing. Next we need to set out the top and right-most extent of the drawing. The distances we know from our sketch: 200 mm wide, and 100 mm high.
  5. Switch to the Parallels with distance line type, and a 'distance' text-input box appears in the top toolbar. Enter '200' in this. Now when you hover anywhere just to the right of the vertical line, a very short indicator line will appear at the x-axis 200 mark; this shows you where the line will be placed. Click to place this line.
  6. Repeat a similar parallels process for the horizontal top line, 100 from the bottom one that's already done. Now you should have a 200 x 100 box.